The two greatest post-punk performers from the long dead-and-gone decade of the Eighties won't go away. They are still around and still provoking more passion and outrage than anyone from this nearly expired one. Both have recently been the subject of TV programmes where their former associates put the boot in. One has just finished a rapturously received weeks tour of a seaside town, the other is just about to start a National tour. I'm talking of course about the pop star anarchist Margaret Thatcher and most particularly the former Prime Moaner of Great Britain, Steven Morrissey.

Of course, at the time they were thought to be intractable enemies. Morrissey led his Smiths Party with its manifesto of vegetarianism, lyricism and fanaticism to landslide victories in the Indie charts, garnering the votes of tens of thousands of unhappy young people who rejected the brash flash carnivorous Eighties which Thatcher was Lord over. He even penned a cheery song called 'Margaret on the Guillotine', complete with the sound of the blade falling.

However, its now clear how much they had in common despite their denial, and how comparable and in fact complimentary their greatness is: both Northern, both outsiders, both considered mad, both little Englanders, both acutely aspirational, out for revenge, highly iconic and with a gender all of their own, they stamped their authority all over the Eighties so much that its now plain to see they did for the Nineties.

Yes, Morrissey the son of modest Manchester Irish working folk may have been avenging the working class while Thatcher the petit bourgeois was annihilating them as a political class, but they had something in common which sealed their greatness and their place alongside one another in the history books: hatred. Both Maggie and Morrissey were inspired destroyers, which is to say, lovers. Thatcher destroyed the British Establishment and the Tory Party. Morrissey destroyed pop music. Together they destroyed England. As Morrissey's mentor, the lover-destroyer of Nineteenth Century polite society Oscar Wilde put it, each man kills the thing he loves, the brave man with a pop single.

If it has become something of a cliché that Morrissey is the last pop star, everyone neglects to point out that this is because he choked off the great tradition of English pop with his bare hands. After Morrissey there could be no more pop stars. Like the Iron Maiden, he was an act which was impossible to follow. "The ashes of pop music are all around us if we will but see them", Morrissey pronounced back in 1987. And he was right. But he was the one holding the box of matches.

His unrivalled knowledge of the pop canon, his unequalled imagination of what it might mean to be a pop star, his breathtakingly perverse ambition to turn it into great art and his single-minded, total, desperate, insane commitment to the pursuit of these things could only exhaust the form forever. Moreover, Morrissey's mastery of Englishness was so self-conscious, so ironic, so devout, so evil and finally so played out that English pop and even Englishness itself could never hope to recover from it. The unnatural, analysing, stripping heat of Morrissey's love of Englishness, the grainy black-and-white Sixties iconography of The Smiths sleeves, the lyrical world of iron bridges, hum-drum towns, repression, frustration, and amorphous desire could only end up separating Englishness from anything solid and turn it into a free-floating signifier. (The real reason Morrissey now resides in L.A., the City of Signs).

When The Smiths finally expired in 1987, after guitarist and collaborator Johnny Marr walked out of the group and into Electronic obscurity, Morrissey may well have risen again on the third day and succeed in pursuing a successful (if uneven) solo career, but the body of English pop lay lifeless in the tomb, hopelessly extinct, wrapped in back issues of the NME. A large rock blocked the entrance, rolled there by Morrissey himself.

The so-called BritPop phenomenon of the Nineties which so excited some newspapers and a couple of hairdressers at the time, did not represent a resurrection of English pop, merely a galvanic motion induced by the application of large amounts of cash. BritPop was nothing but commercial footnotes to The Smiths, a belated and somewhat hysterical attempt by the record industry to cash in on the legacy of the original Indie four-boys-and-guitars band whose money-making potential was never fully realised in their lifetime.

It may be impossible for a generation raised on a diet of hype to comprehend, but The Smiths were never played on daytime radio. Their singles barely grazed the Top Twenty. They never made it into the papers, except to be denounced (for risqué songs such as 'Handsome Devil' - 'a boy in the bush is worth two in the hand/I think I can help you get through your exams'). And they refused to make pop promos. In other words, by toady's slaggy standards they were a bunch of losers.

Yet they had a large and fanatical following and are revered today by many as the greatest pop group ever. Their 1996 album The Queen is Dead has been officially ensconced as the Eighties album by critics. By contrast, the media-PR-record biz conglomerate known as BritPop had the keys to the World handed to it on a BPI-monogrammed velvet cushion - Indie now merely means mainstream niche marketing - and yet if failed to inspire a singe Kleenexs worth of the devotion The Smiths did hidden resolutely under a bushel. Under the arc lamps they kissed, and although they ended up with sore lips, it just wasn't like the old days any more.

The BritPop bands themselves seemed strangely deathly - much more slavishly retro than The Smiths, who were denounced at the time for their nostalgia, had ever been. Blur were The Kinks for students and confused teenage girls who mistook Damon Albarn for someone sexy. Suede were David Bowie before he went all Lets Dance, with some Marc Bolan licks thrown in for good measure. Oasis were a Beatles tribute band for car thieves and New Labour MPs who, by only their third album Be Here Now managed to become their own tribute band.

This band of Manchester working class boys with Irish antecedents were seen as The Smiths minus the troublesome, effeminate, evil genius - which is to say, Marr without Morrissey. And indeed, Marr the scally Beatles fan fond of partying could perhaps have trodden the same football crowd-pleasing path if he hadn't had the Sandie Shaw-worshipping abstemious introvert to nag and pervert him down a much more creative one. According to the legend, Noel Gallagher decided to become a pop star after seeing Johnny Marr on Top of the Pops playing with The Smiths (typically, Blur's Damon Albarn decided to form a band after watching a The South Bank Shows profile of The Smiths).

So Morrissey was burnt at the stake by the NME in 1992 for appearing on stage with a Union Jack. Banner headlines accused him of racism. Of course, this was, like Maggies Poll Tax faux pas, merely a pretext for a coup against him by his former supporters. Just a few years later the Union Jack would become an official part of the NME-sponsored BritPop merchandise. After all, Oasis were an ethnically-cleansed version of The Beatles, with pasty faced Noddy Holder in place of John and Paul's admiration of Chuck Berry. The infamous court-case of 1996 in which The Smiths former drummer Mike Joyce was awarded equal royalties with Morrissey and Marr by a judge who had to have Top of the Pops explained to him, was an opportunity for unlimited and, given the implications, somewhat reckless schadenfreude.

Morrissey had to become an unperson in order for the Nineties to happen. Put any of the BritPop stars alongside him and you immediately see why. Pop stars (like politicians) have turned into mere celebrities. Even their fans don't pay much attention to what Damon and Bret have to say, which is probably just as well. Jarvis Cocker promised a great deal but threw it away with that embarrassing tantrum at Michael Jackson at The Brits and a general post Different Class shabbiness. Skinny Richey Manic had the good sense to disappear before his band became famous, fat and fatuous (This is My Truth, Tell Me Yours).

The actual wake for English pop was kindly laid on by Oasis fan (and ropey Margaret Thatcher impersonator) Tony Blair in 1997. Having decided to rebrand Britain as Cool Britannia he invited the celebrity executives of BritPop round to No. 10 for a drink and a finger buffet provided by Meg Matthews. The new apparatchiks of the English political establishment and English pop finally met in a schmoozing embrace for the cameras, and it was rather more difficult to tell them apart than it should have been.

It was left to that old Seventies pop rocker turned Panto Dame Elton John to sing the music at the actual funeral of English pop, in the form of the Diana tribute 'Farewell England's Rose'. To the hundreds and thousands lining the streets, and the hundreds of millions watching the funeral live around the world on what amounted to the last ever Top of the Pops, Diana was the nearest thing to an English pop star the Nineties produced. Which was of course the greatest indictment of that decade. Although omitted from Meg Matthews guest list, Morrissey's laughter still echoed through Westminster Abbey on that September morning in 1997, unnoticed by the assembled feudal dignitaries and their heirs and successors the celebs, but mightily frightening the pigeons nesting in the gargoyles.

The last laugh really was Morrissey's. Not only did BritPop fail to achieve the only thing which would have justified it - to halt or even just tread on the toes of the advance of dance (I'm Blue, do-do-do-dum-dum... And French. And wear naff overalls) - it failed miserably in its main, material ambition: America. BritPop faltered in the US and then promptly imploded over here, because America already had the genuine article in the form of Morrissey, thank you very much, and didn't see what it was supposed to do with all these third-raters. Like his doppleganger Maggie, Morrissey's solo career has been much better received in the US than here, where it has continued to grow throughout the Nineties, far exceeding the popularity of The Smiths.

It is probably too much to expect that what's left of England will embrace Morrissey again, even though the Nineties and BritPop are over. After all, to invoke another Wildism, society often forgives the criminal, but never the dreamer. And Morrissey is both. However, anyone with an interest in this outmoded art form should take advantage the opportunity afforded by the temporary guarantee of immunity from prosecution during his UK tour extended by the Home Office to Mr Morrissey on purely humanitarian grounds, and catch live the man who murdered pop. With his genius.


Mark Simpson's Saint Morrissey is published early 2000 by Little, Brown (UK)

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